Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American novelist whose debut Homegoing traces three centuries of a family split between slavery and freedom.

Literary Fiction Historical African American

About Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana and moved to the United States as a child. She grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and studied English at Stanford before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Homegoing (2016) was her debut — published when she was 26 — and became an immediate critical and commercial sensation, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for the John Leonard Prize and selling in 35 countries.

Gyasi researched Homegoing over multiple trips to Ghana and years of reading about the slave trade, colonial Ghana, and the Great Migration. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is a complete stylistic departure — intimate, present-day, autobiographical in feel.

Ghanaian Literature Slave Trade Generational Saga Addiction Science & Faith

Novels

Novel — Debut

Homegoing

2016

Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana are separated by circumstance: one marries a British slave trader, the other is sold into slavery. The novel follows their descendants across seven generations — from the Gold Coast to the American South to Harlem to present-day Alabama. Each chapter is a different character's story. Devastating, essential, unforgettable.

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Novel

Transcendent Kingdom

2020

Gifty is a Ghanaian-American neuroscience PhD student at Stanford studying addiction and reward pathways in mice — driven by the loss of her brother to heroin and her deeply religious mother's depression. A quiet, interior novel wrestling with science, faith, grief, and the immigrant experience. Completely different in form from Homegoing but equally powerful.

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Reading Guide

Where to start

Start with Homegoing — it's one of the most remarkable debut novels of the century so far. The structure (a new character per chapter across 300 years) sounds like it shouldn't work and is completely captivating.

Transcendent Kingdom is excellent but will feel like a smaller book after Homegoing's sweep. Read them in order — each shows a completely different range, which is extraordinary.